What the Story is About

I promised that I’d post a little more on what my story is actually going to be about, and I have not lied! I did say that it would be “tomorrow,” as in October 3rd, and that did not turn out to be true. These fifteen minute will weigh forever on my conscience.

Today is the first day of the Six Month Novel project. It got off to a pretty inauspicious start, since I’ve done almost no writing, but I have managed to get an extremely tentative one-sentence pitch for the story: “A few innocent, everyday people stumble upon evidence of a massive, solar-system-wide conspiracy, and have to go on the run from the conspirators to save their lives.” Naturally, that’ll get refined at every step of the process, but there it stands.

This story is based roughly on my second NaNoWriMo novel, though hopefully it’ll end up being a lot better that that turned out to be. That novel was in turn based upon a one-shot roleplaying game session I ran for some friends, which was in turn based upon a sort of fictional universe a cobbled together while “playing” the Orbiter spaceflight simulator.

If you have even a passing interest in spaceflight or science fiction, I strongly urge you to check out this program. It’s a freeware, extremely realistic simulation of spaceflight and orbital mechanics. This is not a program for X-Wing jockeys, since even simple maneuvers are complex and time-consuming, but if you have the patience for it, you’ll find it massively rewarding. Going from the surface of the Earth to the surface of the moon using nothing but the built-in tools for manipulating your orbits is tremendously rewarding.

Difficult and time-consuming but rewarding. Sounds a lot like writing to me.